Within the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, there is significant interest in identifying screening systems that are more clinically relevant in predicting physiological responses in normal and diseased human tissues to reduce the incidence of costly late-stage failures during pharmaceutical clinical trials, as well as to reduce the use of animals in drug testing. Empiric approaches in cancer treatment result in many patients receiving multiple cycles of therapy without success before the lack of efficacy is identified.
Identification of therapies and individualized therapeutics is of critical importance to cancer clinical research. The development of clinically relevant assays to predict drug efficacy would allow the identification of patients who may benefit from a certain therapy while sparing others from the side effects of futile treatment.
The ability to improve patient selection and a means of enriching clinical trials to better identify effective candidate regimens for patients with given tumor types is the future of molecular medicine. Nevertheless, ex vivo chemosensitivity assays have never really borne fruit despite waves of optimism in the past mainly due to failure to recapitulate the in vivo conditions in an ex vivo environment.